Will settled the belt around his waist. "You hope."
"No, you hope." As Bat let his AR-15 slide from his shoulder, Will saw the sheathed dagger he had on his left hip.
"I take it you expect to get close to anything we have to fight?"
Bat snapped the bayonet on to the AR-15. "Knife worked for you."
True, but I don't want to be that close again. Will said nothing and pulled the slide on the Mac-11 back into the firing position.
"I think we have trouble." Bat stood in the doorway and looked out. "Big trouble."
"What's the matter?" Tadd turned toward the south-facing window and shrugged his shoulders. "The sun's coming up, big deal."
"I think, Mr. Farber, you will recall," Crowley commented as he drew his machine-pistol, "in this dimension, the sun does not rise in the south."
Ryuhito sent an honor guard of his warriors through first, then he entered Blue Africa through the circular dimensional gate. In Blue Africa, it looked no more remarkable than a circle of termite mounds, while in the dimension Girasol it appeared like a pond with a shimmering rainbow of lights. Stepping free of it, and refusing to let himself acknowledge the nausea he felt from using it, he floated up into the air on a disk made of golden light.
To his immense pleasure, he saw Blue Africa in all its dawning glory. Beneath the hilltop above which he hovered, he saw a compound filled with tents and a few mobile homes. Beyond it, to the north, he saw a thick jungle that gave way to the hills on the far side of the valley. In the distance, he could make out some terracing and stones, but other details escaped him in the darkness. They did not matter, for his mission was to slay what he had found in Blue Africa and, clearly, the compound was his target.
He floated back down to the ground as his army climbed free of the dimensional gateway. The first battalion formed up, and Ryuhito smiled. As rank upon rank lined up, radiating green in the backglow of his glory, he saw his army would be more than enough to destroy those who had invaded Blue Africa.
The first battalion on station was a mixed assault battalion. Creatures he designated as Hammers made up the first company. The heavily built and thickly armored drones formed a solid wall behind which the rest of the battalion could advance. Drawn up in two ranks of 20, the Hammers could run at a top speed of 15 miles per hour, which had proven sufficient to blast through the defensive positions of the opposition in his wars. All bony spikes and blocky fists, both fortifications and enemy soldiers crumbled beneath their assaults.
Behind them came 80 of the half-sized warriors with the diffused nervous system that Pygmalion had praised. Try as he might, Ryuhito had not been able to find a design that worked as well at surviving a combat. Because their central nervous system had ganglia-knots at the joints, one part of the creature could be torn off and the rest of it would continue to function. Damage to the chest cavity could incapacitate one, but having two hearts — one high and one low — meant that even massive torso trauma would not guarantee a kill.
The Gnats, as he called them, used fangs and claws to kill. Aided by incredible reflexes and superior agility, they were difficult targets to hit. Because they kept coming and coming, they forced the enemy to devote more resources to destroying them than they might have seemed worth. Because ignoring them was not an option, once the Hammers had opened a hole in the enemy line, the Gnats could terrorize the enemy from within.
Behind the Gnats came the warriors he called Paragons. Tall and slender, they had an incredible reach. Their hands and arms, while incredibly thin, were whiplike in their ability to strike and flay an enemy alive. At the same time, a Paragon possessed the strength necessary to crush a man's chest in its bony grasp. Built on legs that looked remarkably like those of a locust, Paragons could leap great distances, and the claws on their feet could shred sheet steel. The tail, which they used for stability, had enough strength in its long, flat length to shatter bones and stone with a single swipe.
Confident of victory, Ryuhito bowed to his troops. In unison they executed a deep and respectful bow in return. Moderating his glow, Ryuhito gestured down the jungle hillside and toward the human compound. "Go, my children, feast on those who would do us harm." Feeling safe behind the wall of Hammers that slipped into the brush, Ryuhito advanced in the midst of the Gnats like a teacher leading anxious children on a field trip.
On reflection, Ryuhito realized he had erred in either not making his creatures utterly silent in their movements, or in not giving them hideous and terrifying voices. Though they moved through the undergrowth and through the forest like shadows, the were not careful about avoiding dead branches or topping rock piles that gave away their positions in the darkness. He knew his error stemmed, on one hand, from having waged his wars in the arid, desert-like climate of Pygmalion's headquarters. On the other, of course, he could not have borne the constant combat cacophony that would have accompanied his war games.
While he thought his troops unnecessarily loud in their advance, the thundercrack of the first gunshot startled him. it split the night in half and almost buried the thwip of a bullet exploding the head of a Gnat standing next to him. In an instant, he realized the shot — to get over the line of Hammers — had to have come from a sniper high in a tree. With no way to return fire — another error in his designs he acknowledged — he gave the only order he could.
"Level the jungle!"
The Hammers broke into a run and slammed into the trees before them. Loud, wet snaps echoed between gunshots as the Hammer line closed and began to clear a path 60 feet wide. While he did see two snipers leap from their perches and scamper off before the assault, he saw the line was too wide and moving too slowly. The Hammers could not build up enough speed and, lacking sufficient intelligence to know when something should be bypassed, left holes in the line when a stone outcropping failed to give way.
Before he could stop them, the Gnats began to pour through those holes. Yipping and chittering like homicidal gerbils, the Gnats crashed on into the underbrush. He saw them scampering up the boles of trees, snapping off limbs and showering the ground with bark fragments, it occurred to him that the Gnats had always taken their cue in identifying the enemy by what the Hammers had assaulted, so the Gnats gleefully started to wage war on the jungle itself.
Elements within the jungle fought back. Scattered, single gunshots swelled together to become a ballistic hailstorm. Gnats mewed and wailed as bursts from automatic rifles blasted them from tree trunks. More concentrated gunfire staggered Hammers. The design conventions that made their armor light allowed bullets to penetrate the Hammer bodies. Leaking black blood from dozens of wounds, they stumbled backward. The Hammer line crumbled, and the Gnats poured forward into the guns of the enemy.
For the barest of seconds Ryuhito thought the Gnats might carry the day. The men in the jungle used their weapons to great effect, literally shredding the Gnats as they advanced. The fact that the Gnats kept coming meant more fire was directed at them than would have to have been used against a human cadre of the same size. Had the Gnats been human, they would have better coordinated their attacks and avoided some casualties, but with their rudimentary brains, any order beyond attack or kill meant nothing.
The Gnat line did not so much break as it was blown in little twitching chunks over the floor of the rain forest. Ryuhito watched his creations march into death without a shred of remorse. He used the humans' preoccupation with the Gnats to withdraw. Using the Paragons as a rear guard to screen his retreat, he headed back up the hill to where his second battalion waited.
He looked at them, then glanced back down at the waiting forest. "You will do, my pets, with a few changes. You will do indeed."
Using curt hand-signals, Will directed workers in placing the hastily filled sandbags. No one in the camp had taken the warning about the Red Army Faction lightly, and when Bat's men moved into the rain forest, tension rose in the compound. When the gunfire started, those who had not immediately crawled under cover started looking f
or something to do. Armed with shovels, picks, sledges and scythes, the workers formed themselves into a rag-tag peasant army.
"No freaking slimeball Jappo terrorists are going to scrag this American," one man vowed with the voice of many.
It surprised Will no end to see Crowley walking openly through the camp. The men who looked at him, Will concluded on a moment's reflection, only saw a shadowed figure which, in the relative dark, should not have seemed odd to anyone. Crowley looked over the preparations and nodded as Will approached him. "What will they do now?"
"My guess is that we'll get hit with the heavy forces now." He pointed off into the distance toward where the last assault had bogged down. "This first assault was run like an operation using toy soldiers. The shock troops came first, then the light, fast troopers came later. The bullets we used on them had more brains than most of things they tore up. My guess is that this next wave will come with similar troops, but each one of them will be more heavily armored."
The Native American frowned. "Isn't another frontal assault rather foolish?"
"Yes, but I don't believe Ryuhito will see it that way. The integrity of his creations is on the line. He has to try with brute strength one more time or admit he's foolish."
"If he comes at us again with a frontal assault, he'll prove he's foolish."
Crowley slapped Will on the back. "Exactly, which is why we can't let him get a third try at us, because there will be no predicting what he will do." The shadow man glanced off to the north. "I know we can beat him this time, but after that..."
Somewhere out toward the south, a single gunshot broke the stillness of the night. Will ran forward and hunkered down behind a sandbag barricade. As he drew his Mac-11, he saw Crowley go running forward toward the edge of the jungle. In a second, more because it felt right than it seemed smart, Will leaped up and followed him. He dropped to the ground beside the shadow man, then crawled forward to the bole of a tree.
"You don't have your normal sidekick, so I'll fill in, okay?"
"Glad to have you, Will."
Will strained his ears to hear anything. "Are they out there? I can't hear them."
"Not a question of hearing, Will, but of feeling." Will saw gold glint from Crowley's ring finger as he waved his right hand in a circular motion before the jungle. "You can feel them out there, I know you can."
The Native American took a deep breath and forced it out slowly. Narrowing his eyes, he willed his consciousness to expand. He forced it into the forest, controlling it so it would not spread out behind him and confuse him with the emotions of the other workers. He smiled, realizing that he did have that sort of control over his perceptions within Turquoise, and once again he felt ancient spirits coming to his aid.
His perceptive barrier pushed on out and down into the ravine that ran to the south of the compound. Against the dark backdrop of the steep slope, he picked up the intensity of Bat and his people. They kept their fear in check by letting unbridled hatred roar through them. They knew the foe they faced was unlike anything they had ever fought before, and that excited them. They lived to slay the monsters in the dark, and Will realized they would likely die doing just that.
Beyond them, he pushed his perception and watched as the landscape unfolded before his mind's eye. Past the stream that had formed the ravine and on up the gentle slope to the other side he traveled. He found the place where the initial assault had withered and died. Life leaked from countless bodies, and it was not until he started to count the individual lifesparks that he realized there were so many of the enemy dead, it seemed to him that there should have been more pain, more agony present, hanging like a miasma over the battlefield, but there was not.
The ebbing lifestuff drifted up and away from him like smoke, it took him a moment to figure out that it was not rising to any sort of heaven, but was being drawn up the hill toward the crest of it. Will looked up, rotating his perspective so he faced the direction of the hill. There at the top he saw the crestline silhouetted against the pale glow that might have been a dawning sun. He saw the fragile life-wisps inching their way up toward the summit, and he followed them.
Dread grew in his belly as he did so. He pressed on, then hit a wall that he could not penetrate, it frustrated and angered him, but secretly delighted him. He knew, as much as he wanted to know what lay on the other side of the hill, he had no desire to face whatever it was that created the wall.
He wanted to turn back, but he knew piercing the wall was important. He searched within himself and found hidden strength right where his grandfather had told him he would. His consciousness seemed to meld once again with that of his surname-namesake, and he suddenly saw and felt himself a raven flying purposely up over the wall and on up the hill. He felt etheric wings beat strongly to propel him forward. With the strength of each motion, his self-confidence grew. He drove himself harder and, triumphantly cawing, he swooped up and over the top of the hill.
Will convulsed as his consciousness abruptly snapped back into his body. He dropped his gun, then clutched his arms around himself. "God in heaven, no!"
He felt Crowley's hands on his shoulders. "Easy, easy. Trying to breach that wall is not something you should do. We can just waft on this side and give an early warning to the men when the assault comes."
"You don't understand, Mr. Crowley, I got through."
"You got through?"
"I did, I got through." Will shook himself and forced his terror away. "Ryuhito is up there, and he has plenty of troops. More are arriving each minute. "This won't be Roarke's Drift or even Little Big Horn." Will picked his Mac-11 up again. "This is Desert Storm, and we're defending Iraq."
Ryuhito studied the proud ranks of his warriors and knew victory would be theirs. He had mutated his Hammers into Ultra -Hammers by filling in the holes in their armor and doubling their size. He made their brains larger and managed to instill in them enough of a basic cognitive framework that they would recognize insurmountable obstacles and deal with them appropriately. Of course, he allowed to himself, with their strength they are now invincible.
Two companies of Ultra-Hammers stood backed by two companies of Wasps. Gnats had been enlarged and more strongly armored. The need for more intelligence did demand a centralization of their nervous system, but the addition of horns and a thick skull-plate protected the added brains he stuffed into their heads. More importantly, though, he modified their bracers to provide them with missile weapons capable of visiting accurate and deadly retributions on snipers.
He reveled in the elegance of the design. In a system reminiscent of how a shark always has teeth growing up out of its jaw, a four-pointed star-shaped piece of chitin grew flat atop the bracers. When one of his Wasps cranked its hand up and back, the internal pressure forced the top star up and around so one of the points positioned itself between the Wasp's middle two fingers. Bringing the arm forward and accompanying it with a snap of the wrist would free the organic shuriken and sent it off on its way.
Because of how he had designed his creations, they could continuously create new throwing darts, because their chlorophyll allowed them to draw energy from sunlight alone. He knew they would need more nutrients to be able to produce an ongoing supply, so, while he worked on the Paragons, he set his Wasps to foraging and devouring all the plant and animal life they could find behind the Ultra-Hammer line.
The Paragons he changed the least. He filled in the holes in their armor and provided them with enough muscle to move. He modified chitinous plates on their backs so they could flick out and help the Paragons get lift during, or glide after, their leaps. Their weaponry became more formidable just with their increased bulk. He half-considered giving them some sort of missile weapon, but decided against it. The samurai had shunned the gun because it lacked honor. So, too, would his Paragons remain unsullied.
With a clap of his hands, he called the Wasps back from their foraging. He intensified his solar glow so they could charge themselves up, then he pointed
toward the forest and the encampment beyond it. "There, my children, are your enemies. Yours is the honor to succeed where your brethren failed."
Will saw the sky brighten and swallowed hard. "They'll be coming now."
Crowley nodded and stood. "We'll pull back to the barricades. Better fields of fire."
The Native American frowned. "But don't we need to be here to cover Bat's men as they retreat?"
"Do you honestly think they'll retreat?"
Will shook his head and ran back to one of the sandbag fortifications. To reach it he had to pick his way through a tangle of sharpened stakes that had been cut from the jungle and stabbed into the ground a good 20 meters in front of the sandbags. Like a porcupine's quills, the ends of the stakes had been barbed so that any creature impaling himself on one would do more damage pulling it free than it made going in.
It struck Will as curious that the stakes had been placed thickly on either edge of the compound, but more thinly distributed toward the center. Likewise, the sandbag shelter in the middle of the line had no one standing behind it, while all four of the others did. Clearly, Crowley and Hal wanted to channel the warriors into the middle, but if the line could not hold, the enemy would split their camp in half and destroy them.
Fiddleback Trilogy 3 - Evil Triumphant Page 14